The Superman who fell to Earth

The tear-streaked return of the Man of Steel, an accomplishment of elegance in filmmaking, is also something else: the first truly mainstream 9-11 movie.

The tear-streaked return of the Man of Steel, an accomplishment of elegance in filmmaking, is also something else: the first truly mainstream 9-11 movie.

June 27, 2006|By TED ANTHONY asap

We don't expect deep emotional experiences out of our superhero movies. We're not conditioned that way. We expect action. We expect romance, a tear or two shed at love lost or regained. We expect triumph and glory and, ultimately, chest-thumping, cape-swirling victory.

Now comes "Superman Returns" to change all that.

From its mood-saturated opening scene to the equally tear-streaked finale, director Bryan Singer has created a movie of deafening elegance and lyricism that is about as American as they come. It raises real-world questions that have never been more timely: Does humanity actually need a hero (or, if you choose to read it another way, a savior)? Or should we simply trust in ourselves and charge forward?

It is, really, a veiled debate between religion and secularism, cloaked, as modern Americans do, in the com-forting trappings of modern mass culture. But "Superman Returns" is anything but comforting. It is a catalog of disaster pastiches and accompanying soul-searching that could not have been made before Sept. 11, 2001.

REAL-WORLD ANGST

The plot, briefly: Superman returns to Earth after a five-year absence and finds Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) with a 5-year-old son and ensconced in a serious relationship with Perry White's nephew. Lex Luthor (a shorn Kevin Spacey), meanwhile, is plotting to use Kryptonian crystals to create a new land mass in the North Atlan-tic Â? valuable real estate that will make him the world's most powerful figure. Trouble is, the ensuing rise in water will submerge most of North America.

The film opens Wednesday Â? June 28, 2006. Count back five years, and you'll see that Superman left three months before 9/11. So we can assume that, in the world of this movie, everything America endured since then has been without the stouthearted assistance of the Man of Steel.

Now: Watch the imagery. Scenes unfold in harrowing succession: a flaming plane as a fiery missile, hurtling toward the city. Buildings shaking and buckling. Rooms collapsing. Worlds upended physically and metaphori-cally. Stunned people huddled around a hospital waiting for answers. And all this in Metropolis, a city designed as the comic-book stand-in for New York.

It doesn't end there. Luthor's land mass, when it emerges, is gray and jagged and metallic, jutting from the water just as the shards of the World Trade Center poked through Ground Zero's dust in the days after 9/11.

And Luthor himself, approaching a beaten and restrained Superman from behind to dispatch him with a jag-ged kryptonite shiv. Is that so far from the unwatchable imagery of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi slitting the throat of a Western hostage in Iraq? "I don't want to be a god," Luthor says. "I just want to bring fire to the people." Shades of Osama bin Laden.

Finally, there is the falling man. At one point, Superman plummets from the sky straight down toward the ground in utter silence as spectators watch, necks craned, unbelieving. What image is this but the iconic photo of "The Falling Man" shot outside the Twin Towers on 9/11 by my colleague Richard Drew?

And when the enormous metal globe atop the Daily Planet building tumbles toward Earth, and Superman grabs it and hoists it skyward once again, the metaphor becomes even more direct: No other man can take the world upon his shoulders and put it back where it was. Where it should be.

MEN OF STEEL

Until now, the television and movie section of the Superman canon hasn't shied away from over-the-toppery Â? sometimes delightfully ("Superman: The Movie"), sometimes annoyingly ("Superman IV: The Quest for Peace"). George Reeves and even his eventual successor, Christopher Reeve, played broadly Â? Reeves in the case of Superman, Reeve in the case of Clark.

Never, however, did an actor bring utter believability to both roles. Until Brandon Routh.

While George Reeves' Kent was hard-nosed and action-packed and more interesting than his Superman, the portrayal was too forceful for Clark Â? too much like his alter ego. Christopher Reeve, meanwhile, accentuated Clark's tics and clumsiness to the point where he became simply an annoying office figure. And Dean Cain, a likable Clark, made for a washed-out Superman.

The finely chiseled Routh has the whole thing down. It's not because his Superman is better than Reeve's Â? they're similar and equally compelling, though Routh's is more muted Â? but because his Clark is. In Routh's hands, the farm boy from Smallville becomes someone you could actually hang out with.

In his first scene, it's clear Superman recognizes his persona is as much icon as hero. He basks in the applause of a stadium full of admirers and realizes: This is part of the job, this self-mythologizing that will help him fight Â? and intimidate Â? evil. Routh's Superman portrayal is pitch perfect: It contains both the Big Blue Boy Scout of the Reeve era and a darker, sadder figure who seems almost a little boy lost.

SUPERHERO SUBTLETY

"You wrote that the world doesn't need a savior," Superman tells Lois. "But every day I hear people crying for one."

This is not a happy guy. Superman is dashing and good, but he is moody and haunted by what he can't do. It's Man of Steel as firefighter or cop: He watches TV news, sees chaos unfolding and, despite his formidable power, ponders his own impotence.

In one remarkable scene, Superman hovers atop the world, his super-hearing tuning into a polyglot cacoph-ony of humanity as his ears sift out emergencies so he can spring into action. It gives you insight into what Singer thinks: Of course we need a hero. Where else are we going to turn?

There is resolution at the end of "Superman Returns," but it is subtle and inconclusive. If the movie were a comic book, the ending would be rendered only in pencil, not in ink. Superman flies off, not into the sunset but into the night sky, to contemplate his future. It is uncertain, just like the fate of his city and the people he has adopted.

As it should be. For as any savior worth his salt realizes, it is the striving Â? the flying forward into the dark-ness with no sense of what's ahead Â? that truly makes us human.

Ted Anthony, the editor of asap, covered the aftermath of 9/11 in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.